Clone as method of iMac backup.

Still deciding which backup method to start with. With my MBP I preferred cloning with SuperDuper. This way if I ever had a drive failure I could just put the clone in and be back up and running in 15 min.

The iMac isn't the same animal, as you can't just switch the drive yourself. It seems like a clone would be less useful on an iMac, or is it?

Assuming your drive failed, and you had a clone. Then had Apple replace your drive with a new one, could you boot from the clone and then in turn clone your new drive from that clone? If that's the case, that would sit well with me.

"Does anyone know if I could use SuperDuper to restore a clone drive on dissimilar Mac hardware? (i.e. PPC iMac to PPC iBook or Intel MBP to Intel iMac)
If not, any recommendations as to how I could backup one Mac and restore that backup to another Mac if I had to, preferably without having to install OS X first?"

The problem here is that the _version_ of OS X on one Mac, might not contain the proper system software components to properly boot and run the OTHER Mac.

It might, or it might not.

The only way to get an idea if it's possible is to connect your backup drive to the OTHER Mac and try booting from the backup drive.

I believe if your original software installation is from a "generic" OS X install disc (i.e., one that is a "commerical/universal" instal DVD, that was a separate purchase), you can pretty much boot any Mac from it -- so long as that Mac was supported by the universal install DVD. For example, I installed OS on my white Intel iMac from the original Snow Leopard release DVD, and found that my installation would boot a NEWER "aluminum" iMac as well as mine.

HOWEVER -- if your original software installation was done with the "machine-specific" DVDs that come packaged with the computer, the above trick might not work, because the machine-specific DVDs don't necessarily install all the necessary resources to boot other Macs.

Again, the only way to know if what you want to do is possible is to first hook up the OTHER Mac in question and see if your backup (from the first Mac) will give you a "good boot".

Having said that, I consider a backup "clone" produced by either SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner to be infinitely more valuable than a Time Machine backup, because
1. You can BOOT FROM the cloned drive (can't boot from a TM backup), and
2. The files on a clone are in POFF (plain old finder format), and all you have to do to access them is copy them "by hand" if it gets down to that.

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